[Wed Feb 29 12:07:41 CST 2012]

Since I'm a big time reader, I was really excited about the idea of using e-books. After all, what's not to like about the idea of being able to carry thousands of your favorite books with you everywhere without taking up much space and being able to read them from different devices, right? If you put it that way, it obviously is heaven to a reader, which is why the idea is finally starting to take off. From the moment that e-readers are affordable enough and there is a good selection of books out there, they are indeed a very convenient way to read. And yet, there is something that has been bothering me about the whole idea. It was something that I couldn't totally explain. And no, it's not that I'm closed to new products and ideas, since I use other new products just fine. That's not it. There was something else that bothered me about e-books, but I couldn't put my finger on it.

So, finally, when a friend and I talked about reading a book and discussing it together, I took the plunge and decided to purchase an e-book from Amazon. Yes, I had read many other books that were in the public domain on my smartphone or my netbook before. However, they were all free. This was the first time I actually purchased an e-book from a major vendor. I have nothing to say about the reading experience, which is fine. However, it's clear to me that I'm not as free reading an e-book as with an old, physical book. I know, I know. "Free" is a very open term. It could mean almost anything. So, in what sense do I say that I don't feel free? Well, for starters, the e-book I purchased from Amazon contains some DRM that makes it impossible for me to read it on anything but their own proprietary software... and they don't bother to develop a version for Linux, of course. Yes, I could use Wine and run the Windows version. Yes, there are other ways to force it. However, one never knows when it may break. And yes, I know it runs on Android, which is Linux in the end. My smartphone runs Android and I do have an Amazon client installed on it. The underlying problem is not the code for the client itself, but rather the DRM technology they use. In any case, one way or another, the fact is that I cannot move the book to my netbook and read it there when it suits me... because Amazon doesn't care about my choice of operating system. Which brings me to the second point: I have looked around on my smartphone's filesystem, and couldn't find the actual file with the book. It seems to be sitting somewhere on Amazon's own servers in the cloud. In other words, I have paid not for a book, but rather for the right to read a book, the same way one doesn't pay for software but for the right to run it on the vendor's own terms. Needless to say, that is yet another way to curtail my freedom. To make matters worse, while I wouldn't say that I move very often, the fact is that I move far more often than most people. Suffice to say that in the last 10 years I have been living in three different cities in two different countries on two separate continents. One would expect that Amazon would have some sort of single sign-on system, but that doesn't appear to be the case. At least that was not my experience when I moved to Spain back in 2006 and had to use the British or French version of their website. I contacted Amazon, and they told me I'd have to create a new account. What happens to my e-books when I move then? I prefer not to find out. I think that, for the time being, I will stick to e-books that are in the public domain and the good old physical books, which I can still lend to a friend without any worries.

If you are interested in this topic, here are three interesting links:

• Richard Stallman: Stallman speaks out against Draconian copyright, the Kindle, the Sony Reader, and e-books' risks to freedom (TeleRead)
• Richard Stallman: The Danger of E-books (PDF)
• Stephen Shankland: Richard Stallman: Break free of e-book's "chains" (C|Net)

{link to this story}

[Sun Feb 19 18:43:01 CST 2012]

Since the hard drive on the kids' MacBook fried, my oldest son tried to figure out how to get his old iPod Classic to work with Debian Squeeze. Although Banshee and gtkpod managed to mount the device, though, they both seemed to experience some problems truly reading its contents and, especially, writing anything to it. This happened in spite of the fact that the underlying HFS Plus filesystem appeared to be correctly mounted read-write. So, what was it? Well, journaling on the HFS Plus filesystem on the iPod needed to be disabled in order for the thing to work fine under Linux. You can go two different ways about accomplishing that. You can either run the following command from the terminal:

$ sudo /usr/sbin/diskutil disableJournal [device]

Or, alternatively, you can follow these other directions using the GUI:

1. Connect the iPod to a Mac.
2. Go to Applications, then Utilities and launch the Disk Utility.
3. Select the iPod on the left-hand side (the volume itself, which should display the same name as your iPod).
4. Hold down the Option key while you click on the File menu and then select the option to turn off journaling.
5. Eject the device.

That should be all. Your Linux system will now be able to do its magic with the iPod just fine. {link to this story}

[Fri Feb 17 14:07:41 CST 2012]

While listening to an episode of the Software Freedom Law Center podcast on the basics of compatility in the copyleft world, I hear them make an interesting argument in favor of the GPL: unlike other licenses, it allows the developer to choose which particular version of the license they want to release their work under. Yes, it sounds like nitpicking, but it's quite important actually. If the people in charge of the podcast are right (and I don't see why not), when one uses, say, the Mozilla Public License, there is always a chance that those in control of defining the license itself may make some important changes to it at some point in the future. So, for instance, if I release some code in 2012 under the MPL, and then the actual terms of the license are changed in 2013... well, the new changes apply to my code, whether I like it or not. In order to change that, I'd have to re-license my code. Yet, in the case of the GPL, it is perfectly possible to choose a particular version of the license to release your software under. This is, for example, what Linus Torvalds chose to with the Linux kernel. He didn't like the new GPLv3 for whatever reason, so he continued licensing the code under the older GPLv2. Now, that's a flexibility that may prove handy. {link to this story}

[Fri Feb 10 13:11:46 CST 2012]

Helping my oldest son installing dyne:bolic on his laptop, at one point I had to chroot into another partition on the system to configure GRUB. However, as soon as I ran grub-install I saw the following error:

grub-probe: error: cannot find a device for /

It makes sense. Since I'm inside a chroot'ed environment, it doesn't find the actual device entry under /dev. The solution? Simply run the following command before you actually chroot:

# mount --bind /dev /mnt/new/dev

That will create the bindings and will let you operate on the device entries from within the chroot'ed environment just fine. {link to this story}